A Novel is Born

It is funny where ideas come from, and how they sort of gestate and develop and form over time. And then you have a substantial piece of work, a book, and you look at it and say to yourself: even if nobody else knows it, even if it's never going to be published, or even if it is and few people read it, I've done this. Regardless of what happens in future, I've done it. This is a feeling that no negativity can take away from me.

The novel in embryonic form: file cards.

The important thing is to capture the ideas as they come. I tend to use filing cards in the first stage of gestation (I'm sure this is a very silly metaphor, but in my mind it is associated with warm eggs protruding from the straw - a very vivid picture from my childhood, though I lived in a rural setting for only four years).  

 First I write down some questions and ideas and then look up for books that might help my research. The cards are perfect for this: easy to carry about in your purse, minimum fuss when you go into the library. In the PhD there is a lot of theoretical research as well as the factual stuff you need for a historical novel. The file cards are not only light and versatile (for hasty note-taking), but they are traces of all my various searches, reference and archive in themselves. 

Research is obviously indispensable, but there is a trap - actually more than one, but I'll deal with research particularly for historical fiction in future posts. In a creative writing project the most important thing is to keep writing the story, the novel, the poems, the play, or whatever it is one is writing. But it's very easy to spend hours and hours reading up and taking notes on research and neglecting the writing part. I suppose the same goes for any other PhD, too. Research as a form of procrastination, or perhaps an expression of fear: a wish to put off the moment one has to deal with the work itself. 

My novella The Life and Times of Milagros Riquelme was first written in these notebooks.
The early ones have very little in common with the actual
text as it was submitted for my MSc dissertation. 

My remedy for this is - what else could it be? - to write. Even if it's silliness, or incoherent phrases establishing a mood, or setting a scene, or a half-formed conversation, I fill in those notebooks, or I type and type like there's no other thing in the world. For a few hours, everyday. Even for a few minutes, if it can't be hours. (Eventually it will have to be, but that's another tune, which I'm sure I'll be singing in a years' time).

Is it a good thing to be a split personality and do and keep your writing in two different media and various devices? I'm sure more organised people than myself would decide what method is best for them - longhand? typing? - and stick to it. I am writing this post on my laptop, and some of my notes and first drafts are here, on on the ipad. But the very first formulation of an idea, a story, a character, is and always will be in longhand, on file cards and notebooks. I've come to see those as planting pots, or small patches of earth, where the first seeds are deposited. When I'm fidgety and restless in front of a blank computer screen, I shuffle the cards, or rummage through the notebooks. 

Implements for purple prose.

Pens, pencils, and fountain pens are also important for analogue me (see previous post). I love my Cross pen, and purple ink: it reminds me of my grandfather whom I never met, a teacher; he died in 1956, in his late forties. He used to write letters in purple ink, with that elegant hand which people took the time to practice back then. There is something about words written in purple ink: they seem to be more alive, to be flowing from one end of the page to the other. Blue is dull, black is funereal; there is a whiff of legal papers and of the notary in a page scrawled in black. But purple is good: kind to the eyes, vivid, and a little bit old-fashioned. Just like what I want my writing to be.